A Halloween's Wish
by eidechse
Summary: Corny wishes that he had back what he thought he would never want again: a way into the world of the faeries. And, with a little help, he might get it. Slash.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: I recently found this fandom and noticed that no one ever did anything with poor Corny! I was absolutely horrified! So, being the proactive person that I am, I decided to stop bitching and start writing! I don't know if there's any interest in slash fics in this genre, but I hope you'll give it a chance. Two disclaimers before I start, apart from the obvious I-am-not-the-author-of-Tithe-or-the-other-book-in-this-series one:

1.It's slash. It's a story about Corny, and Corny is gay. You don't like, you don't read. I won't be offended. I will be offended if you flame me because it's slash. Any other reason, feel free.

2.I haven't read the second book in the series. The libraries around me aren't real great, and I am too poor to buy books before they come out in paperback (and lately too poor to even do that) , and whatever-the-name-of-it-is is really slow in going paper. So, if I completely mess things up, forgive me and try to pretend you haven't read it either.

CHAPTER ONE

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It was starting to get dark outside, the sun falling behind the curve of the Earth slowly, like a climber inching painstakingly across the Pacific to the other side of the world. The shadows were long, stretching across the road.

Corny's shift was almost over. He sat outside the gas station, watching the cars go past, absentmindedly cleaning underneath his thumb with a fingernail. It was Halloween, and

Every so often a group of kids would dance by, smirking angels and grinning demons and witches with brooms taken from the cleaning closet. And then there was occasional fairy, winged and white dressed, looking more like Glinda the Good Witch than any real faerie he'd ever seen.

The drugstore glitter wings were a harsh reminder of where he'd been this night a year ago. Nathemial's court had been beautiful and cruel, and he had been trapped there of his own violation, unquestioning as a child and devoted as a lover, drunk on fairy wine and lust. Nothing but a slave, powerless and helpless.

Now he was no one's but his own. He hadn't even seen a faerie since Kaye had dropped in a few months before, and he told himself that he was grateful, but he still wished for some of what he'd had then, when he was too weak to deny it.

Tonight it was Halloween, and he had nothing to lose.

When the girl came to take his shift, all blond hair and tanned legs and arms, he slid to his feet wordlessly and retreated to the safety of his old car. It started with a screech, and he frowned as he pulled into the street. He didn't know what he would do if the thing stopped working.

The kids were out in droves here, along the street, monsters and princesses trooping down the sidewalks, mothers hovering nervously at the fringes of the smaller children's groups. His headlights swept over the people, lighting the picture of a fantasy world in which children were everything they'd ever wanted to be, identities snatched from their dreams and their nightmares.

By the time he got to the edge of town, the only people he saw were the occasional groups of teenagers skulking through the night, laughing and probably drunk. He left them as he drove past the city limits.

He'd known where he was going when he left the gas station, back in town, but he'd still been surprised when his hand reached out, as if of it's own violation, and flipped the turn signal to blink right. He was even more surprised when the rest of his body obeyed the rebellious hand and he turned the wheel away from home. He was going to pay a visit to the Unseelie Court.

The hill was the same as he had remembered it, all shifting shadows and shivering trees silhouetted against the sky. He was thankful that no one had realized it would be a great place for a Halloween party. Although, it occurred to him, the fact that the hill was deserted might have been no accident at all but instead the very deliberate work of the fairies. He parked his car along the side of the road, pausing a moment before getting out, peering into the blackness. Nothing.

He started the walk up the hill, looking for any sign of movement, any rock recently moved, any hint of life. He found none. By the time he was to the top of the hill, his confidence had wilted. Why had he thought that he would be able to find the entrance this time? He kicked over a rock; underneath there was only dirt and a wriggling earthworm, caught naked in the air. No faerie lights, no trap doors to another world.

What had he expected? He thought of the stories that would pop up in his browser window when he searched for information on faeries. Stories of men who had seen the beauty of the Seelie Court and then wasted their whole lives fruitlessly trying to return, like moths straining to reach the sun. The pictures showed feverish eyes; mouths that were open so that the desperation was visible there, nestled in their throats. Choking them.

He let out a breath and sat on the ground, his shoulders rounded in defeat. The cold soaked through his jeans; he wrapped his arms around his stomach and hunkered down in the face of the wind.

He would be a part of the hill. He would wait until morning, for if there was any hope, it would be tonight, Halloween, when the veil between the human world and the faerie one was so think he thought he could see the shadows of the faeries through it. As though it could be brushed away with the lightest of touches, gossamer so light it would disperse under his fingers like smoke.

CDCDCDCDCDCDCDCDCDCDCDCDCDCDCD

He awoke stiff and cold, to the gray of the hour just before dawn. The hill was ghostly with half formed shadows tilting and spinning in the wind. The air smelled thick and fresh, the heavy greenness of pre-storm.

He shivered and sat up. Drops were already falling, dark dots on the rocks. He pulled himself to his feet, stumbling down the hill to his car.

It was so much like the morning a year ago had been. Except this time he had not been accepted. He leaned against the cold metal of his car for a moment. It was solid, comfortingly so, wet with dew. The sun was rising on the other side of the hill, but the day wasn't going to be a light one even in a few hours.

He was turning to get into the car, give up and go home, when he saw the figure out of the corner of his eye. He whipped back around and saw the trace of a face, only a few feet in front of him, but in an instant it was gone, leaving only shifting shadows. Still he could see it in his mind's eye, clearly, for all that he'd had only a glimpse of it.

The most beautiful man he'd ever seen. Dark hair had framed the pale face, eyes deepset and piercing, dark and dancing with shadows, full lips set in a twisted-lipped smirk. And, rising from his back, a pair of wings, delicate and dark.

There was nothing there in the darkness, but he knew that there had been. He stayed there, staring into the darkness until the black turned to gray and finally night split apart to make way for the sun.

CDCDCDCDCDCDCD

A/N: so, if you liked this enough to keep reading, please review, just because I have no idea if there's any interest at all in this and if not, I won't bother to write anymore than what I have done (two or three chapters) Also, title ideas would be really, really cool. I suck at titles.


	2. Chapter 2

Thanks for the reviews, glad someone is interested in this story

CHAPTER 2

There wasn't anyone there when he got home. There wasn't usually anymore, not with Janet dead and his mother working more. He suspected that she'd taken more hours to cut back on the time that she had to share the house with him. The time they spent together was awkward and sad.

He knew that he should move out, just get the fuck out of the whole town; there was nothing to stay for anyway. Take his old car and pack all the stuff he didn't mind leaving behind (not much) and just drive until the engine died or something. Instead, he kept going to work at the grimy gas station during the day and coming home to the smoky trailer and his computer and comics.

He dumped his jacket on the couch and walked straight to the bathroom, pulling his shirt over his head as he walked. He had been going to take a bath, but when he saw the scummy tub, he changed his mind and started a shower, hot as it would go, until there was steam gathering, trapped just under the ceiling.

He only stopped shivering when he stepped under the cascade of water, leaning against the cool wall of the shower and watching the water flow around his feet.

His thoughts were running in circles, looping themselves into a maze, and he was so tired that the thoughts only came in pieces so that by the time he got to the end of one, he'd forgotten the beginning.

They were all scurrying around the face that he saw, and even when he tried to stop thinking of it, digging his fingers into his palms, he couldn't. The face was still there, dark eyes staring out from the blank walls of the shower, looking through him and into him. Those eyes knew the whole story and they knew that he had come back for more.

He turned off the water and grabbed a towel, sitting on the bath mat on the floor, hugging his knees to his chest.

He knew that that night, he'd go back again.

He always waited until dark. Sometimes he'd go after his shift at the gas station; other times he'd get off work early and drive aimlessly until sunset or go home and watch TV or surf the web until it got dark.

It was always the same: sitting, in the dark, on the hill, staring into the blackness until his eyes started to play tricks on him and his sight danced with a million tiny points of light. He never saw any faeries, let alone the one that he wanted to see.

In the morning, just before it was light, he would stumble back to his car and go home before anyone noticed that he'd been gone.

His web history was a horde of links to sites about faeries and the Seelie and Unseelie courts. He found that all of his web searches went in circles—it was the same information over and over again, presented differently.

The forums on faeries were crawling with thirteen year old girls with words like "night" and "black" and "goth" in their sreennames (A/N: don't be offended if this is you, I have seen it done tastefully) and the "L" and "O" keys worn out on their keyboards.

The basic thing that he found out was that he was a fool for thinking that he could get into one of the courts without a faerie guide—and he already knew that Kay wouldn't take him, she'd done "enough damage the first time."

And then there were the jokers that would come to make fun of the freaks who believed in faeries. He tended to get a couple emails a month from them, usually calling him stupid; a fag; a freak. He read them before he deleted them. Some masochistic desires kicking in, that he had to listen to every insult that got thrown at him. He thought maybe he read them because he knew that they mostly were true.

It was a few weeks after Halloween that he logged in and found David's message, sitting innocently in his inbox, titled "fairy."

He noted the spelling and clicked on it suspiciously, his forehead bunched into a scowl. The scowl turned puzzled as he read:

_Hey, I found your address on a message board. If you really know all this shit about fairies, I need your help. Last night, this guy with wings showed up in my backyard. I thought they were fake or something, but they weren't. Then he passed out on my porch. He keeps blacking out, but when he isn't unconscious, he doesn't want me to tell anyone about him, and they'd all just think I was crazy anyhow. Any suggestions?_

_--David_

There was an address after the name, some town in Ohio. Corny didn't even think about it, he just stared at the screen for a minute, then scrabbled through the piles of papers around his monitor until he'd found a scrap piece of paper. He scrawled the address down, then stood up and flicked off the computer all in one motion.

A duffle packed with his stuff and fifteen minutes later he was ready to go, standing in the kitchen, debating whether or not to leave a note for his mother. She probably wouldn't notice he was gone; they often went several days without seeing each other. And besides, what would he put as a reason, anyway?

He went out to his car without leaving anything.

His heart was beating hard in his chest as he started the old car. Could-be-a-joke, it said. Could-be-a-joke-could-be-a-joke-could-be--.

He reached for the radio and noticed that his hand was trembling. He fumbled through the jumble of things on the passenger seat until he found a cigarette, relaxing a little at the first breath of smoke. Poison medicine. Could-be-a-joke, his heart beat. Could-be-a-joke.

He kept driving.


	3. Chapter 3

Sorry for the wait, I was out of the country for 5 weeks and so I couldn't do any updating, and then when I came back, I couldn't find this chapter, which I'd had mostly done. Updates may be a little sparse in the next month or two, I'm moving and starting a full time job, both of which have the potential to be pretty time consuming I guess.

Chapter 3

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Corny got there midmorning a few days later. He hadn't slept except for a few fitful hours every so often, curled up in the driver's seat in rest stop parking lots, placing what he knew was an undeserved amount of trust in his car's locks and human character. By the time he reached his destination, the world looked gray and seemed distanced from him by a fog of fatigue.

The address was in a residential part of town. The few people walking down the sidewalks were his age; it must be a college part of town. The house was painted a bright green with a deep blue door, and in the gray of his mind the colors seemed so dazzling they hurt his eyes. He parallel parked crookedly, and got of the car slowly, checking the scrap of paper in his hand again. It was the right place.

He knocked on the door and stood awkwardly on the step, looking out into the gray of the street instead of at the door. Could-Be-A-Joke, beat his heart.

He was thinking about knocking again when the door finally swung open to reveal a young guy in jeans and a t-shirt looking puzzled.

"Uh, David?" Corny guessed. He should have called or something. God, he hadn't even emailed. He shifted his weight to his other foot uneasily.

"Yeah?" The guy—David-- yawned, and ran a hand through short black over-gelled hair.

"My uh… My name's Corny… And you emailed about… the uh… the…" He sure as hell wasn't going to say _faerie_, not until he was positive that this was David and that the whole thing hadn't been some kind of joke.

David was still staring at him, squirming and stuttering on the step, and suddenly apprehension dawned on his face. "Oh, shit, oh, you're the guy! That I emailed? I didn't know you were coming. Jesus, you're lucky you didn't get my roommate." He backed into the house, holding the door open. "C'mon, the…." He paused, doing a quick visual scan of the area in much the same style as old movie TV detectives. "The… _boy…_ is still here."

_See,_ Corny told his traitorous heart, stepping into the room. It was a large room, messy, much as he'd always imagined a student room to be. Furniture that looked left over from the 70's covered the ugly carpet, and there was stuff everywhere. Gingerly, he picked his way to a clean spot in the floor before looking up to meet David's gaze.

David was openly staring at him, smirking a little. "You don't look like I expected."

"What did you expect?" Corny's voice was harsh, immediately on the defense, and David looked a little taken aback.

"Oh, I don't know… Just… Someone who looked like they believed in fairies. Some little goth chick or something, I guess."

"Yeah? Well, apparently you believe in faeries, huh? Are you 'some little goth chick'?" David was making him uncomfortable; he was still staring. Corny crossed his arms over his chest. The movement seemed to startle the other boy, he snapped his eyes away from Corny and looked sheepishly at the floor.

"Yeah…" he finally said, running a nervous hand through his hair. "Yeah, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have assumed."

Corny snorted.

"So, anyway, the… guy… is down here," David finally said after a short silence, gesturing down a hallway.

Corny nodded and David started off down the hall. They passed doors left wide open and hanging ajar until they got to the last door which was rather obviously closed. "He won't be awake," David warned as he pushed lightly on the door with his fingertips.

It swung open, and Corny didn't even remember pushing his way forward, but he found himself standing in front of David, staring at the bed, his heart pounding. And there he was: the faerie, lying tangled in the sheets, a pair of wings awkwardly folded underneath him.

He looked nothing like Corny's faerie— blond hair and pale skin, his eyelashes strokes of surprising darkness where they lay softly on his cheekbones. Looked more like an angel than a faerie. He looked healthy—simply asleep—until Corny's eyes strayed from the face and down across the pale chest to where two gashes sliced open the taut skin over the boy's ribs, running from his chest to where they disappeared behind the sheet that was lying across his stomach.

Corny had crossed the room and was pulling back the sheet that covered part of the wounds when David came up behind him. "It's not as bad as it looks. Not too deep."

"It looks plenty deep to me," Corny replied, surprised when he found that he was clenching the sheet tight in anger. "Why the fuck have you just left it open?" Concentrating a few seconds, he carefully uncurled one finger at a time. "Should of put on a bandage or something, at least." Now that his attention had been distracted from the actual faerie lying there, he noticed the blood stains smeared on the sheets.

"He won't let me," David explained, shrugging. "Whenever I touch him, he struggles… kicking, hitting out at anything. He's not quite _awake_ but it's like he knows someone is there."

"How'd you get him here then?"

David shrugged again. "He was completely unconscious when I found him. I was coming home from some party, not entirely sober, either, and there was this… person… in the alley, and it's not a homeless guy or anything, you could tell he wasn't just sleeping or whatever." He snorted. "So I'm freaking out, right, and I start to call the cops, y'know, maybe an ambulance… and then I saw the wings and shit. And I _know _I'm not that drunk, y'know? So I brought him back here, didn't know what else to do."

"Yeah…" Corny muttered, not paying too much attention any more. The faerie had moved a little. Not much, not even enough to wrinkle the sheet that Corny had carefully lain back over him, but he'd definitely stirred a little.

"…what I should do?" David finished his question.

"What?" Corny asked, looking away from the boy with difficulty.

"What should I do for him?" David repeated, looking bemused. "I'm completely stumped."

"What, do you think I'm a doctor?" It had only just occurred to Corny that this guy expected him to have some great answer, like he was an expert on healing faeries that looked like they'd gotten in the way of a machete. "I don't know what to do, you need to find a doctor, take him to the hospital or something. You keep him here and you're playing with his life."

David actually laughed. "What, take him to the hospital with the three foot fucking wings on his back? 'Yeah, doc, they're just his fashion statement, he had them surgically attached'? Besides, maybe what works on us would kill him, you want to chance that, huh? You think I'm playing with his life, what do you want, to get him locked up in some lab somewhere?" He started to run a hand through his hair, but caught himself halfway through, bringing his hand down to stare at his palm as though he might find an answer there.

When he began to speak again, it was quieter, and Corny knew that he was being manipulated by a soft voice and calm words, but the earnestness in David's voice cut straight to the part of his brain that equated quiet with logical as David spoke low and fast, like a man on a prescription drug commercial trying to sneak in the nasty side effects.

"Look, I know you're not a doctor. And I know that maybe you don't want to have the responsibility of this… kid's… life on your hands. But you walk away now, and he might die. You're already responsible." Corny felt his stomach shift as he recognized the truth in the words, even before David continued: "I got no clue what to do, and you're the only one I know who might even have an idea. That's all I… _he_ needs. Just an _idea._ Are you not going to give it to him?"

Corny sighed. "Alright. Fine, I'll try. First of all, is there any iron in the room?"


	4. Chapter 4

Sorry for the long long wait. I just got internet access last week. So hopefully the next chapter will come a little faster.

Chapter 4

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"Iron?" David looked at him quizzically, then shrugged and glanced around the room. "Well, sure… Is that bad?"

"It can't be helping," Corny said, shrugging. "Let's get everything out into the hallway."

They had to sift through the layers of stuff to find anything iron, because the room was a mess, full of drifts of clothes and papers covering the carpet, creeping toward the bed and out the door. Eventually their collection included an old tire changing kit, full of wrenches and bolts; a pair of huge boots that looked like they might be steel toed; and an amp that neither of them had been sure about.

"Is that it?" Corny asked.

"Yeah, should be," David replied without a lot of confidence. He was surveying the room as though he could see through the first layer right down to the floor. "Oh."

"What?"

"Well, I think… I think that the bed frame is maybe iron."

They both looked at the bed. Sighing, Corny crossed the room to inspect it. "Shit," he swore. "It looks like it is iron. And you said that you can't move him?"

"Not unless you want a black eye and maybe a kick in the stomach."

"You think we could move the mattress? With him on it?"

David looked at it doubtfully. "We could try."

It was harder than it sounded. The mattress was a queen sized, and one of them couldn't comfortably take two corners. Whenever they lifted it, it folded almost in two, folding the faerie boy with it. His head lolled around on his neck grotesquely each time they jarred the mattress. They finally got it set on the floor, on top of a pile of dirty clothes. The boy murmured in his sleep and curled into the fetal position.

They wrestled the bed frame out into the hallway and stood it up lean-to style against the wall. David regarded it from his hands on knees position, trying to catch his breath. "What the fuck am I going to tell my roommate?" he moaned.

Corny snorted. "What, you don't think it'd be believable if you told him you were cleaning for once?"

David shot him a poisonous look before returning his gaze to a spot on the brown carpeting. "So… what now?"

Corny shrugged, leaning so that he could see through the door to where the mattress lay on the floor. "I don't know. We wait? See if this made a difference?" It wasn't a great plan, but he didn't know what else to do.

"Sounds good to me." David straightened up. "You want anything to drink while we wait?"

--------------------

They waited. When it got dark, Corny took the blanket that David offered and stretched out on the scratchy couch and slept—the best sleep he'd had in half a week.

It was sometime near morning when he woke suddenly and completely, eyes open and watching the lights of a passing car make moving lines of light across the ceiling. He wondered if it had been the car that had startled him out of sleep, sighing and burrowing down further into his makeshift bed.

Then he saw the girl.

She stood by the door, completely still as he stared at her, silently staring back. After a few seconds she moved into the pool of light the streetlamp outside threw onto the carpeting. She was young—his guess would have been ten or eleven had she been human, but Corny could tell at once that she was not. She had the light hair and delicate features of the boy in the bedroom, and Corny suddenly realized that he doubted very much that the resemblance was coincidence.

He sat up, then, and the sudden movement caused her to flinch, slipping back into the shadow. Wincing, he froze and after a few moments very carefully and slowly sat all the way up.

"My brother…" the child said in a soft voice. "Please… I know that he is not well."

Feeling as though he was still asleep, Corny swung his legs to the floor and got up, starting to walk toward the hallway. When he got to the first door he paused and waited for her, watching as she followed. Her feet made no sound; she seemed to glide above the mess of the room.

When they reached the room she started toward the bed with a cry. "Ryne!"

He was steps behind her, reaching out to stop her before she touched her brother, a warning half formed on his lips when he froze.

The boy was awake. His eyes, light like the rest of him, were focused on Corny's face. Then his sister reached him, a ball of childish energy that threw her arms around his middle. He hissed in pain, the eyes closing again for a few seconds.

Realizing that something was wrong, the child pulled back, eyes wide. Swallowing, the faerie on the bed opened his eyes and took a deep breath in. As he breathed out, Corny could see the pain leaving his eyes until they were clear and calm. He smiled at his sister.

"Greetings, Elysabet. Have you come to take me home?"


	5. Chapter 5

A/N: So… I checked Valiant out of the library. Didn't like it. It lay under my bed for a few weeks, and then it was overdue and now I have a library fine. Not cool. So basically, I still have not read it. So if this isn't parallel with that, it's because I'm too lazy to do my fanfiction homework. And I'm a full time volunteer and therefore don't have enough money to pay 50 cent library fines.

I apologize if there's some typos. Or if this chapter just sucks. I was so tired when proofreading this that I was seeing double.

CHAPTER 5

"Wait!" The word was out of Corny's mouth before he had a chance to think about it. It hung there, a desperate cry that all of this would not be for nothing, evidence that he was terrified that all of this would slip away Corny would be lost with no leads yet again. The only thing he could think of was keeping this creature here with him.

"What?" The faerie—Ryne—turned to look at him and Corny forgot what to say for a breathless moment when those eyes met his and froze his breath in his lungs, froze his thoughts halfway from his brain to his mouth. The eyes fixed him to the wall and examined him as easily as if he were cut open and lying on the operation table, lesuraly those eyes analyzed him for only a few moments that stretched on like they were lifetimes where he couldn't breathe or think or speak or move.

Then it all came back in an instant and the words that he'd been try to say fell from his mouth like shards of ice, crashing noisily and clumsily into the silence.

"Wait… I have… I would like to ask a favor."

Ryne looked at him, considering, then nodded. "It is fair. You have saved my life. If it is within my power to grant, consider your wish done."

Corny swallowed, nodded, tried to get the words out. "Take me with you. To the faeries."

Elisabet's eyes widened, she looked at Corny, then back to her brother. The faerie's eyebrows were pulled tightly into a frown as he stared down Corny. The eyes underneath had turned fierce. The stare lasted a few breathes and Corny thought he could hear the ice shards tinkling to the ground and smashing there.

Finally the faerie sighed. "It is done. I would not refuse to do what I had promised. But hear this, human, and listen well: I guarantee you no safety. I offer no protection. I will take you with me and there I will leave you. Expect nothing else."

Corny nodded. The shards of ice in his lungs were on the floor in front of him and he couldn't get his breath back. Ryne turned and started for the door, Elisabet following. Corny stood watching them for a moment before stumbling after.

Ryne was striding down the sidewalk with his head up proudly, looking unnaturally healthy for someone who had been unresponsive just a few minutes before. Corny was teetering on the threshold of the door, heart pounding, completely terrified that the thing he'd wanted had come true, when a door opened down the hall.

Surprised, Corny turned to see a confused and sleepy looking David standing in the doorway frowning at Corny.

"I heard voices," he said. "Did my roommate come back?"

"Ryne is leaving." Corny explained hurriedly, try to keep one eye on the street. "Your faerie. I am going with him."

"What?"

Corny stole another glance out the door. The faeries were getting farther away, almost a block down the street. "I can't explain," he said desperately. "I'm following the faerie."

"You're _following_ him?" David was awake now, staring at Corny. "Well, fuck, I want to come."

Corny shrugged, already starting down the steps and sprinting down the street. "You'll have to catch up," he tossed over his shoulder.

When he caught up with the pair, Elisabet gave him another worried glance and Ryne ignored him altogether. A moment later David had joined them, wearing only a pair of flannel pajama pants and some dirty sneakers with no socks. Ryne didn't acknowledge him, either, although when he'd jogged up behind the trio, Corny had seen the faerie's shoulder muscles visibly tense in irritation.

The four settled into a brisk walk through the darkness, passing dark houses like shadowy boxes and welcoming ones with yellow light pouring out into the night. The sound of their shoes on the pavement was the loudest noise, and Corny noticed that Ryne and Elisabet passed over the ground almost soundlessly, so graceful and light on their feet they were.

Corny didn't know how long they walked. They'd long ago left the outskirts of town and were now winding their way through trees and carefully picking their way through the damp muddy leaves that blanketed the ground. The moon had come up, glowing with a light that made the leaves on the trees look silver but leaving the bark an impenetrable black.

Ryne still hadn't acknowledged the two boys' presence, although Elisabet kept casting worried glances over her shoulder, her even features pulling to the center of her small face in a frown.

The sun had started to come up, illuminating everything in a muddy gray light, as though they were in an old movie. Finally they stopped in front of a tree that seemed to Corny to look like the hundreds of other trees they'd passed.

It was large—an old beech tree, it's ghostly white limbs branching crazily above their heads. In it's trunk were carved three symbols that Corny did not recognize. They'd been there for quite a while—the scars were so thick with age that the shapes were barely discernable.

Without hesitating or even seeming to have to think about it at all, Ryne reached out and pushed firmly on a section of the tree that looked to Corny no different than any other section. The bark seemed to shimmer, and then a piece as large as a person simply wasn't there any longer. For a moment, Corny felt like he could see the whole tree—see the sap running up to the leaves like the blood ran through the arteries in his own arm. Then the feeling passed, and he was left looking into the perfectly hollowed out center of the tree with a tightly winding spiral staircase descending into the gloom.

For the first time since they'd left the house, Ryne looked back at him again. "You'd do well to remember what I warned you, human," he said, before taking a few steps forward and starting down the steps.

"What did he warn you?" David asked.

"That we'd better not expect him to protect us," Corny said grimly. Elisabet's blonde head disappeared down into the earth. "C'mon. Let's go."

He took a deep breath, trying to calm that heart that was always too noisy for it's own good, beating _this is a mistake, this is a mistake. _

But when his foot hit the first step, he suddenly felt completely and surprisingly calm. His muscles, which had been aching from the hike, loosened and relaxed. His heart quieted and slowed. The shards of ice that had been stuck in his throat since he'd first asked the favor of Ryne melted and the smooth cool seemed to slide down his throat. For the first time in his life he felt like what he was doing was totally, completely, purely right.

He floated down the stairs as though he belonged there just as much as any faerie.


	6. Chapter 6

So. A year between updates I'm an awful, awful person, and I'm sorry. Truly. Maybe I can get the next chapter out in a more timely fashion.

Chapter 6

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The first thing that Corny noticed as he descended was the smell. It was earthy, musty, and moist. The air felt cool and soft against his face and hands. He realized, for the first time, that he had forgotten shoes; his bare feet were traveling down worn stone steps and he could feel the hollows left in the rock by countless other feet that came before him. His heart, which had been clamoring for attention a few moments earlier, steadied, until he couldn't even feel his heart beat anymore—it had been overtaken by a stronger, faster beat that shook the soil and air around him.

The beat was getting louder, and as he went deeper and deeper down, he recognized it as music—fast paced music, sound diving and twirling frantically through the air. Violins and tambourines, and of course, that deep beat of a drum. He was unsure whether he wanted to dance or to freeze, trembling.

He looked up toward the shrinking spot of light above him. Morning had come; the hole in the ground showed the faint orange light of the rising sun. David was behind him, his eyes large and face white. His eyes found Corny's for a moment, then darted away, as though it was Corny he was afraid of.

At the precise moment that the last view of daylight was cut off by the curve of the tunnel, Corny was able to see the world of the faeries. Flickering light filtered into the tunnel from below. A few steps further, and he could actually see the huge underground room filled with faeries—faeries flying among stalactites above tables full of faeries both ugly and beautiful, graceful and lumbering. Faeries dancing drunkenly to the music, and faeries leering at them over plates of food and tankards of wine. The scent of the place, thick and intoxicating, reached his nose. The Unseelie Court was exactly as he remembered, and it took his breath away for a moment.

Ryne paused before stepping off the stair to fix Corny with a stare full of graceful eyebrows and indifferent warnings. Elisabet hovered behind him, her eyebrows pulled together in worry, her child's face anxious. Then they turned, and as Corny watched, they disappeared into the sea of moving color.

He was not worried by their disappearance. He was smiling, intoxicated already by simply being there. He took a step forward, stopping when he felt a tug on the back of his shirt. He turned, puzzled, and was startled to see another human face there before he remembered the events of the past hour. _David._

David was frightened, his eyes wide and his adam's apple moving under the thin layer of skin of his throat as he swallowed multiple times before finally getting the words out. "What _is _this place? We can't go in there."

"The Unseelie Court," Corny replied impatiently, shaking David's hand off of his back. "And, yes, we can go in there. I have been trying to get here for a year. I'm going. You…. Do whatever you want." He stepped off the stair, and was immediately surrounded by bodies on all sides.

"Wait!" He heard David yell behind him. "You're not leaving me alone!" A moment later, the other man had clamped his hand around Corny's wrist in a death grip that was evidence of how frightened he really was.

They pushed their way through the crowd. "Don't eat or drink anything!" Corny shouted back to David as a small winged faerie hovered in front of his face, dangling plump purple grapes invitingly.

"What are we doing here?" David asked, a little hysterically, once they had made their way to the relatively quiet side of the room.

"Looking for someone," Corny answered. His eyes hadn't left the room, they were scanning the crowd carefully. Everywhere he looked, though, were dozens of moving faeries, flying, running, fighting, blending into shifting colors that were impossible to recognize.

" Who?" David was asking, over and over, but Corny ignored him.

He had thought, originally, that the court was exactly as he'd remembered. Now, he realized that he had been wrong. Movements were more frenzied, eyes that had been cruel, frightened, lustful, on his last visit were now just manic. It was troubling.

He tore his thoughts back to the present. He was not sure what to do, where to start. He had no name for the stranger he was seeking, no title, nothing but a half seen shadow of a face in the dark. He can remember when he lay on the dark hill all night, hoping to gain access to the world of the faeries. Then, all he had wanted was an escape—a night, or a lifetime, of getting drunk on faerie wine, of a stranger's hands on his body, of drugged complacency with life.

Now, he thought that he could still get lost in that if he tried to. But the face that he had seen haunted him, made him reluctant to lose his head to wine and sex and give up on this chance.

He was trying to think about what to do, plans racing around half formed in his head, when he saw him. The faerie he had come here to find was right in front of him, although far away, standing on the raised platform at the front of the room. Behind him were the two golden chairs of the king and queen, standing empty. The same sneer that graced his lips in Corny's memories of him was on his face now as he looked out over the crowds. Standing there by the thrones, dressed in clothes of deep red and black, he looked like a prince.

Corny's first impulse was to fight his way over to the dais, but as he started to take a step, he realized that he had no plan for what to say or do once he came face to face with his quarry. He paused, then decided the time was right for a smarter approach.

He scanned the room, looking for a suitable candidate. Nine or ten feet away from him, a light haired pixie leaned against the wall. Her eyes registered boredom as she gazed out over the festivities. He sidled over to her.

She looked up, surprised, when he got close. Her features distorted into a sneer. "A _human?_" she spat. "What are you doing here, ironsider?"

Corny decided honesty was the best policy, if any policy was going to work in this case. "Looking for him." He jerked his head toward the dais.

The pixies eyes followed his head, and as soon as she saw who he was gesturing at, she burst into peals of delighted laughter. "_Him?_ Have a little bit of a crush, hmmm? Pinin' away after him, is that it?"

Corny shrugged, unwilling to rise to her bait. It struck him that he could use her amusement to his advantage. "He's… beautiful. I wish I knew his name, knew more about him." All true, but the love struck tone in his voice and his attempt at big-eyed human innocence was contrived to make him laughable.

"You're shooting high, ironsider," the pixie cackled. "That's royalty there. Not in power, no more, but he was the nephew of the queen. Kaylychyn." She paused to look straight at Corny, smirking. "You don't have a chance, boy." She laughed again, taking a swig of the liquor that she held in her hand.

Corny was not discouraged. He had a name. _Kaylychyn. _The name was all hard sounds, the 'ch' spit out like a 'k', the three syllables harshly staccato. Yet, it rolled off his tongue easily. He had a tie to the face in his memories. Faeries guarded their names jealously, and he'd already found this one's out. It seemed a good omen. He smiled and leaned against the wall to create a plan.


End file.
